How to Fix the NBA's Unethical Hooper Problem
If you're among the basketball sickos who add social media scrolling to your NBA viewing experience, you likely noticed a trend on Tuesday night.
During Game 1 of the 2025 Western Conference Finals—which eventually turned into a 114-88 blowout for the Oklahoma City Thunder over the Minnesota Timberwolves—Basketball X became overrun with variations on one take.
"I don’t care who wins this game," The Ringer's Bill Simmons wrote. "The touch foul calls SGA gets are really awful. They don’t resemble anything else that’s happening in the playoffs."
"All the contact in this postseason and yet SGA gets a whistle when he falls down with no one touching him," SiriusXM NBA's Justin Termine added. "Hard to watch."
The Athletic's Tony Jones took an even more direct approach:
Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, this season's leading scorer and soon-to-be-named MVP, finished Game 1 with 31 points on 10-of-27 shooting from the field and 11-of-14 shooting from the free-throw line.
He's had a remarkable campaign (and playoff run), but this was far from the first game it was abundantly clear many of his forays toward the basket were made almost entirely in an attempt to draw a foul.
And he's not alone on this front in the conference finals.
Jalen Brunson—who's earned a similar caveat and/or admission that, yes, he is an incredible player—is also a generationally unethical hooper.
Brunson is a master of several grifting classics, like the backward head whip, the stop in front of a defender and hit the deck, the pump fake and launch yourself out of a normal jump shot and into the defense. You name it, he's got it.
Brunson isn't guaranteed to take over the timeline in quite the same way SGA did on Tuesday, but it's certainly possible.
And these two stars, as well as a handful of others over the last several years, raise the question: Is there anything the NBA can do to stop the grift? Can it bring back ethical hooping?
The short answer is yes. And below, we'll explore some ways how.
Use the Tool Already in Place
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This past offseason, after a one-year trial run, the NBA made its in-game flopping penalty permanent.
Officials have the power to whistle a flop on the spot, call a "non-unsportsmanlike" technical foul and send the non-offending team to the line for one free throw.
It's not enough, in part because "non-unsportsmanlike" techs can't add up to an ejection (like your typical T's do), but it's a start.
And there's just no question that the league's referees aren't using this tool anywhere near enough.
Tune into just about any NBA game, including those in this postseason, and you'll see multiple players go to the floor or otherwise accentuate marginal contact to a comical (or infuriating, depending on your perspective) degree.
Those moments need to be identified and punished as often as possible.
Again, it's not a strong enough deterrent. The problem has progressed beyond this half-measure, but taking it is better than continuing to ignore it altogether (or even worse, reward it).
The League Needs to Encourage Honesty About the Problem
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Shortly after Jeff Van Gundy's lengthy run as one of the game's top national color commentators ended, The Athletic's Andrew Marchand reported that "the NBA did not like Van Gundy’s criticism of its officiating—and complained about it to ESPN..."
And it's not hard to see where the league was coming from. Active and persistent criticism of the product, sometimes at the expense of selling it, isn't good for business. But the game's most prominent commentators should also be willing to state the obvious when the broadcast shows a replay of a flop (or some other form of foul grifting).
At times, when watching these games, it sounds like announcers are analyzing these clips like the Zapruder film, looking for the slightest hint of justification for a call. It should be fine to just say "Player X flopped, and the refs got fooled on this one."
This probably doesn't move the needle a ton, but it's hard to fix a problem you're scared to talk about.
Ignore the Marginal Contact and Call the Obvious
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Think back to the Paris Olympics, or really any high-profile FIBA tournament over the last several years.
The NBA players who've spent years falling into the foul-grifting trap, often take a few games to adjust to officials who don't fall for their flops, flails and accentuations.
And the lack of whistles leads to a better, more free-flowing product. The basketball skills we all grew up with, not the mere ability to draw fouls, take over.
This is specifically important on the SGA front. His knack for drawing the whistle often has as much to do with craft as it does blatant flopping. If a defender so much as brushes past him, he'll sell the contact as a hit and immediately go into a shooting motion.
If more of those plays resulted in no-calls, he'd dial it back. He's one of the most gifted offensive players we've ever seen. He's capable of adjusting.
On the other hand, the refs can't let games get out of control either.
Take OKC's series against Denver, for example. The Thunder have a better, deeper, younger and possibly hungrier roster. They were likely to win that round, regardless of how it was called, but Alex Caruso and Luguentz Dort generally being allowed to play at a different level of physicality than others didn't hurt.
Meanwhile, SGA, mostly got his favorable whistle on the other end.
That matchup wasn't the first time the discrepancy was clear, either.
Following a Thunder-Timberwolves matchup back in February, Minnesota head coach Chris Finch broke it down.
"It's so frustrating to play this team because they foul a ton," Finch told reporters. "They really do. They foul all the time. And then you can't really touch Shai. And it's a very frustrating thing."
Now, that might just sound like a coach who's fed up with a perceived bias, but it's genuinely hard to watch OKC (or New York) games and not observe the same thing.
And sometimes, when opponents start to observe it, they think, "Well, I guess that's what I have to do to get a call."
In the Western Conference Semifinals, after several possessions in which he was heavily, I guess we'll call it, contacted without getting a call, Nikola Jokić started to grift. And several of those grifts resulted in whistles.
That context isn't necessarily an excuse for Jokić. Flopping is bad for the game, no matter who does it, but the league needs to be far more careful about what it's incentivizing.
Establish Harsh Flopping Penalties in the Offseason
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Unfortunately, even with a thorough and immediate implementation of all of the above, this problem probably won't go away entirely.
It's too deeply entrenched into the way the game is played in the NBA. And digging it out would take some pretty dramatic measures.
For one thing, most of this should be taken out of the hands of the officials on site. Their job is extraordinarily difficult. They are making split-second decisions about a number of different rules and trying to keep up with the biggest and fastest athletes in the world, who are actively trying to deceive them.
So, instead of saying it's entirely up to them to police the matter, the league should have a dedicated anti-flopping task force (or if that sounds too cool, one official at the replay center each night to zero in on this).
If flops are missed in the moment, the task force (or czar, or whatever) should have the authority to penalize the player after the fact. And those penalties should not be "non-unsportsmanlike" techs. That play is unsportsmanlike. Lying to officials is unsportsmanlike.
Add those plays to their running technical count. Or, even better, make suspensions a quicker result for flopping than they are for typical techs.
These are the absolute best basketball players in the world. This dramatic a shift might shake them up for a few weeks, but they'd get used to it. They'd start playing more like they did in pickup runs as a kid. Players would eventually play each other straight up. Fewer games would devolve into grift-offs.
And that would, undoubtedly, be good for the product.
This is obviously far from a scientific survey, but a suggestion on X that the flopping may lead to viewers turning games off drew scores of replies, generally in agreement.
As one commenter said: "Switched to YouTube golf videos. I’m not even into golf."
Basketball is a beautiful sport. The NBA is still where it's played at its absolute highest level. But right now, there's an obvious blight on the league. And it's fixable.
